People rely on disposable absorbent garments in their everyday lives, including such garments as adult incontinence products, enuresis pants, training pants, and diapers. Many manufacturers seek to better meet the needs of users of such products. With certain products, such as adult incontinence underwear and enuresis pants, it is important that the garments look and feel as much as possible like “regular” underwear to promote an improved sense of normalcy to the wearer who suffers from incontinence or enuresis. Additionally, purchasers and users of such products are frequently embarrassed about their condition and about having to purchase products to deal with their incontinence or enuresis condition.
Currently, the most common method for obtaining incontinence and enuresis underwear is by purchasing relatively large bags in retail stores. Such conventional packages of incontinence and enuresis underwear are opaque or mostly opaque, which some purchasers may perceive as overly “diaper-like” or too strongly connoting the presence of a personal care absorbent product directed to a urinary condition. Such conventional packaging bears little resemblance to the packaging in which durable clothing is sold. There is a need for a package of incontinence or enuresis underwear that better resembles a package of durable underwear so as to improve the feeling of normalcy for the purchaser/user. There is also a need for a package of incontinence or enuresis underwear that allows the potential purchaser to see selected features of the underwear, such as, for example, cloth-like material used to make the underwear, elastic waistbands, and back-label indicators.
Attempts have been made in the art to provided windowed packages to allow consumers to inspect the absorbent garments contained within the sealed packages prior to purchase. However, the prior art does not optimally provide for targeted display and/or obscurement of particular features of pants, particularly with larger underwear such as incontinence and enuresis underwear, some of which frequently require multiple folds in both directions to efficiently configure the underwear for commercial packaging and sale.
Durable clothing and other bulky goods are often sold in a package system that combines a rectangular carton inside a poly bag to allow for displaying targeted displays of features while still maintaining the products in the correct position in the package. Many bags also require a header banner for branding and hanging the package on retail hooks.
When a standard flat bag is placed on a 3-dimensional carton or bulky goods, the result is prominent “dog ears” protruding from the sides of the bag header. This is due to the fact that the flat bag width must be significantly wider than the front face panel of the carton or good, in order to accommodate the depth dimension of the carton. This causes significant difficulties in merchandising the finished packs on shelf, as packs interfere with one another when they are placed side-by-side. The aesthetics are also generally considered to be undesirable.
One way of eliminating the protruding “dog ears” is to utilize a side gusset bag. This method of bag formation tucks excess poly in the top seal, and creates a much narrower top banner, while maintaining the necessary bag circumference to accommodate the carton. This problem with this approach is that side gusset bags are typically used in bulk, loose fill applications such as dog food or lawn fertilizer, and as such the only machines currently available in market to produce this style of bag require extremely heavy and rigid laminate film types. This look and feel is decidedly ill-suited to the merchandising of underwear and absorbent-type products.
A packaging structure is needed that can be produced using soft films which allows a 3-dimensional or bulky contents to fit in a bag for storing bulk goods without undesirable aesthetics.